Roberto Bracco

• Born: November 10, 1862
• Birthplace: Naples, Italy
• Died: April 21, 1943
• Place of death: Naples, Italy

Other Literary Forms

Known primarily as a playwright and a lecturer, Roberto Bracco also wrote poems, short stories, and a screenplay.

Achievements

Despite his popularity in the theaters of Europe and New York from 1900 to 1920 and the firm position of respect accorded his playwriting by theatrical and academic writers throughout the twentieth century, Roberto Bracco has not become an important influence on modern drama. Most critics, however, acknowledge the craftsmanship, psychological insight, and human sympathy found in his drama, calling for study or production of Bracco’s plays based on their own merit rather than as historical curiosities or their use of the ideas of Henrik Ibsen, Gerhart Hauptmann, and Sigmund Freud.

Two reasons for Bracco’s lack of influence are historical: the Fascists’ coming to power in 1922 and the greatly changed attitudes toward theater and literature after World War I, which saw the rise of Luigi Pirandello as a force in Italian drama. As a deputy with decidedly liberal views in the Italian Parliament, Bracco’s political and literary career was cut short by the ascendancy of the Fascists. Under Benito Mussolini, censorship was imposed, fines enforced, and prison sentences issued to offending writers. The political subjects and social issues that Bracco treated were taboo. Commenting on the American premiere of Bracco’s most famous play, The Little Saint, in December, 1931, Walter Littlefield, theater critic for The New York Times, cited Bracco, besides Sem Benelli and Gabriele D’Annunzio, as “easily the most impressive dramatist on the eve of the march on Rome in the autumn of 1922. Since then he has lost his impressiveness, although now he is more secretly read than publicly played for, politically, he belongs to the Opposition.”

That literary historians often make overly general comparisons among writers also has worked against recognition of Bracco’s drama. For example, Lander MacClintock, a sympathetic and balanced reader of Bracco, states that The Little Saint “represents a point of arrival and a point of departure in the evolution of Italian theater.” Oscar Brockett, a major historian of modern drama, finds time only to compare Bracco’s plays with others of the period 1900-1915 and states that they are important for their imitation and popularization of Ibsen. Even though Pirandello’s accomplishments, much discussed by these and other literary historians and critics, were novel, Bracco’s were nevertheless solid in their own right.

Success in the theater may be highly suspect from the perspective of the scholar, discerning audience, or succeeding playwright, but good plays often prove their worth by their initial reception. In the period from 1900 to 1920, only one other Italian playwright, Dario Niccodemi, had more productions than Bracco. Bracco’s plays were performed from Budapest, Vienna, and Berlin to Madrid, Paris, London, and New York. English translations of some of his plays were published in Boston in the dramatic and literary magazine Poet Lore in 1907 and 1908, and the first part of the twentieth century saw the publication of Bracco’s plays in anthologies and college texts of both modern and Italian drama. In 1966, the English theater magazine Gambit translated The Little Saint. Most academic critics, both Italian and American, cite the humane perspective of Bracco’s writing.

Bracco’s major achievements are general knowledge of human life in his time, reflected in a range of dramatic genres, including tragedy, comedy, both light and sentimental, and farce; his assimilation and adaptation of Ibsen’s realism, especially those plays dealing with the women’s issues of his day; and most important, the use of Freud’s theory of the unconscious in his plots and characterizations.

In 1923, Pasquale Parisi, who wrote the first book-length study of Bracco, quoted Bracco himself on the subject of art and drama:

Human essence is all that matters in all forms of art especially theater. One can localize ideas, atmospheres, and characters in order to obtain a greater evidence of truth. And one can generalize ideas, atmospheres, and characters to make more explicit one’s vision. But human essence is always the basic element that an artist looks for, be it near him or at a distance. The results of this search constitute the intrinsic value of a work of art.

Bracco felt the necessity of observing daily life for his writing, finding in it the “chrysalis of his fantasy.” Parisi stresses the natural quality of Bracco’s imagination and thought, which led him past philosophy and ideas as such to the language and action of passion.

The critic Maddalena Kuitunen observes that Bracco’s concern with women’s issues has been overshadowed by Ibsen’s. From a feminist perspective, she disagrees with Bracco’s idea of the maternal instinct as a fulfillment of womanhood, but she credits him with the naturalist’s accomplishment of placing characters in real-life situations of the day. Most critics, however, praise his sympathy for and understanding of women caught in a society in which, as MacClintock writes, the “woman’s only defense or weapon is her astuteness, her coquetry and her powers of seduction.” The tragic plays, from his early period but the work of a mature writer, are women’s stories. In The Tragedy of a Soul, Caterina sets off a chain of tragic events as a result of the weaknesses of her husband and lover. The female protagonist of Maternità (maternity), on leaving her unworthy husband for her unborn child’s sake, discovers that she cannot give birth, and opts to die together with her unborn child rather than save her own life. In The Hidden Spring, a selfish artist neglects his wife, who is his inspiration, and, having driven her mad, must accept that he has cruelly destroyed the source of his art. The female heroine of Phantasms suffers the jealousy of her consumptive husband, to whom she promises fidelity after his death. Tragically, she discovers that the phantasm of her former married life, his jealousy, has made it impossible to love a man with whom she develops a relationship.

Brockett identifies the use of Freud’s idea of the unconscious as perhaps the most important development in drama between 1900 and 1915, which indeed is the element most praised in Bracco’s work. Even Bracco’s strongest and most influential negative critic, Silvio d’Amico, praises his dramatic treatment of the subconscious. As Bracco himself explains in his preface to The Little Saint, he intended to trace both the conscious and unconscious of his characters: “I partially hid the soul of some characters and almost completely that of the protagonists, just as they would be hidden in real life.” In an early play, Il trionfo (1895; the triumph), the protagonist consciously believes that his nonphysical affection for a young woman who has nursed him back to health proves that Platonic love as an ennobling force takes precedence over passionate love. He becomes jealous, however, when she and a friend develop a sexual relationship, thus proving his unconscious desire, a feeling that is stronger than the respect and gratitude he had earlier felt. When the cruel artist in The Hidden Spring becomes conscious of his mistreatment of his wife, she kills herself; they did not understand that the true basis of their relationship was not love but cruelty on his part and self-destructiveness on hers. Bracco’s dramatization of how the unknowable aspects of the mind motivate human action is thus akin to the Greek idea of how the gods provided humankind with choices that had unforeseeable but necessarily tragic consequences.

Biography

Born and educated in Naples, Roberto Bracco took a job as a customs clerk at age seventeen because his parents could not afford to send him to the university. Finding such work unsuitable, he took a job as a journalist with Corriere del Matteo, and soon he acted on his interest in literature, publishing poems and stories in Neopolitan journals and writing one-act plays as curtain raisers for actors of the city. His first volume of short stories, Le frottole di baby (1881; baby’s rattles), was published when he was nineteen.

Works written in his twenties, such as Non fare ad altri (do not unto others), Lui, lei, lui! (he, her, he!), and Un avventura di viaggio (a traveling adventure), point to his talent as a dramatist and led the way to the success of Comptesse Coquette in 1893, which was praised in Naples and gradually produced across Europe. Further successes established Bracco as a leading Italian playwright, allowing him to hold his position as a serious writer when foreign plays and trivial drawing-room entertainments dominated the attention of a large portion of the audience. Steadily writing plays every year or two, Bracco also lectured on the position and rights of women in Italian society, a major theme of his drama.

When the Fascists came to power in 1922, Bracco lost the position he had achieved as a liberal deputy in the Parliament, his plays were forbidden to be performed, and his books were banned. Perhaps the influence of postwar ideas and attitudes would have ended Bracco’s literary career in any case, because his last play, I pazzi, shows his disagreement with the rationalist faith in the new psychiatry as a way to understand humanity or resolve its problems. Perhaps building on the idea of Don Fiorenzo’s mysterious spiritual power in The Little Saint, Bracco presents the protagonist of I pazzi as healing people in a personal and spiritual way that involves love and understanding, characteristic of Bracco’s humane sympathy for life. Living beyond his time as a writer, Bracco died in poverty in 1943.

Analysis

The plays Comptesse Coquette, Night of Snow, and The Little Saint are representative of the themes and attitudes most often cited in Roberto Bracco’s work: his sympathetic attitude toward human predicaments, his concern for the plight of women in his society, and his successful dramatization of character based on Freudian theory (even though he himself valued the lively presentation of life rather than what he considered the tedious solutions of philosophy or psychiatry).

Comptesse Coquette

Successfully performed as Comptesse Coquette in New York in 1907, fourteen years after its enthusiastic reception in Naples, the play comically dramatizes how Clara, the female protagonist, resolves a conflict with her husband over the right to have a lover. With its daring and risqué subject—daring, that is, for the middle-class audiences at the turn of the century—the comedy has been misinterpreted as bitter by academic critics and “frothy” by theatrical reviewers.

At marriage, the flirtatious countess has wrung the concession of having a lover from her jealous husband. When her husband mistakenly turns up where she and her would-be lover, a friend of her husband, have met, Clara boldly sends her husband away but then laughs at the other man’s attempts at seduction. When the husband returns, his jealousy stifled, she goes into the next room with him, forcing the friend to endure their happy laughter. Thus, the countess establishes comically the woman’s right to sexual freedom in marriage, but Bracco has also used comedy to affirm the value of marital fidelity by exposing the husband’s jealousy and lover’s seduction to laughter.

The play reverses the expectation of the time, that the man might have a lover but not the woman; Bracco thus dramatized what he saw as an injustice against women. Clara’s statement to her husband toward the end of the play—“I have looked and looked for the right man and in spite of myself I’ve been obliged to choose you”—does not reveal a cynical attitude toward women on Bracco’s part but rather implies that the wife, too, can receive comic justice because she has had the opportunity but has been unable to take a lover. In Una donna and Phantasms, Bracco treats women’s sexual freedom in marriage tragically, which indicates the importance of the issue to both him and his audiences.

Night of Snow

Night of Snow shows not only that Bracco’s interest in women’s condition went beyond sexual freedom in the upper classes but also that social attitudes affecting women had natural consequences for men. Critics have overlooked the fact that the men in relationships with women in Bracco’s plays are affected by what happens to the women.

Living in the tenements of Naples, the mother and lover of Salvatore, a down-and-out man with a good education, have in the past been forced into prostitution by their poverty. Although the play shows the woman as victim of the social conditions and male attitudes of the day, Salvatore is also a victim, suffering the indignities of being illegitimate. For this he is unable to forgive his mother. During the play, he irrationally refuses the money his mother has honorably begged and earned, and sends her away. She kills herself in despair.

Because the play does not resolve what happens in the relationship between Salvatore and his lover, Graziella, it is clear that the driving force of events is not what happens to women but the necessarily terrible consequences of poverty and its effect on people’s attitudes toward one another. Were Salvatore able to accept that his mother had reformed for his sake, he might have been able to see that Graziella has also given up her life of prostitution for him so that their child, which she is carrying, can be born honorably. Thus, both men and women remain the victims of social conditions, although Salvatore’s male ego could be criticized as reflecting part of the problem unfairly on the women. Before the final scene, Salvatore does resolve his bitterness and resentment toward women when he recognizes that Graziella has a just claim to the money for their child’s sake. Nevertheless, he must leave, unable to bear the ignominy of accepting anything from the mother who has illegitimately given him life. Her suicide shocks both Salvatore and Graziella into horror and inactivity.

When one considers that Salvatore’s loss of his job and Graziella’s former prostitution and present pregnancy provide the conflict in the play, the mother’s suicide can be justified, because it undoubtedly will leave Salvatore and Graziella in the despair that prevented him from forgiving his mother and her from having confidence in their love. Thus, again, Bracco dramatizes the effect of social conditions and attitudes, in this play not only on women but on men as well. The play represents a more thorough use of naturalism than that with which its author has usually been credited.

The Little Saint

Perhaps the key to apparent difficulties of motivation and dramatization in the one-act Night of Snow can be found by analyzing The Little Saint, most frequently cited as Bracco’s best full-length play. To paraphrase his supporter, the critic Rudolph Altrocchi, Bracco was challenged by dramatizing the nonrational links between his characters’ inner self, psyche, or unconscious mind and their acts, words, and behavior. These seemingly mysterious connections had to be imagined by him as an artist and represent “the invisible thread of dramatic development,” though they imply the impossibility of knowing finally the actual sources of human motivation.

Silvio d’Amico has praised Bracco in his mastery of this form, sometimes called the “drama of silence,” or the “inexpresso,” as better than as handled by the French. Established by Maurice Maeterlinck and followed by Jean Jacque Bernand, the audience has to supply with its imagination important words omitted from the dialogue, ideas that perhaps cannot be expressed in words at all. From his preface to The Little Saint, Bracco notes:

Again my art is “vague” in this drama. In it there are never direct words because they lie at the very bottom of the existence of beings whose acts and words correspond to their mind only ambiguously. The continuous discord between my characters’ mind and their behavior constitutes the invisible thread that holds the drama together and leads it, implying the absolute impossibility of telling the tragedy through the surface action.

In The Little Saint, Don Fiorenzo, a wise and retiring priest loved by the people he serves, is visited by his brother Giulio, who long ago departed for South America, and Annita, the daughter of a woman whom Don Fiorenzo has once loved and because of whom, spurred by her rejection, he entered the priesthood. Giulio falls in love with Annita, and Don Fiorenzo supports their marriage plans, but reluctantly. On their wedding day, Don Fiorenzo is so upset that he cannot perform the ceremony.

Don Fiorenzo’s love for the girl’s mother, long repressed in his unconscious, has been stirred, and he responds with a means that he consciously understands by teaching Annita his religious mysticism. Accordingly, she responds to his attention and resists Giulio’s wooing, desiring only Don Fiorenzo’s gentle asceticism. Giulio’s love for Annita is based on a love aroused honestly by her modesty and is straightforward in representing desire seeking satisfaction.

Two months of great psychological disturbance follow, causing Don Fiorenzo’s half-witted manservant, Barbarello, also to become upset. The couple decide to leave for South America, but in an instinctive attempt to preserve Don Fiorenzo’s happiness, Barbarello pushes the brother to his death off a cliff. Barbarello’s seemingly inexplicable act, which ends the play, corresponds, via his unconscious mind, with Don Fiorenzo’s having saved him from death when he had slipped off a cliff before the action of the play begins, which resulted in Barbarello’s brain damage.

The action of the play and Bracco’s method are clear enough. Performed in 1909, The Little Saint was a major success that received unanimous praise from critics. Bracco’s own words best describe his dramaturgy.

If the characters don’t explain themselves, their feelings and worries, there is no way for the spectator to know or understand them. . . . I believe that a synthesis of meaningful signs can throw on the characters enough light to make clear even what is not literally spelled out. I call this synthesis “artifice.” It’s the equivalent of impressions that stay in the mind of the hypersensitive observer of human behavior. Whatever emerges to the outside world is merely a synthesis of meaningful signs which contain the substantial reality hidden behind the surface.

The play ends in a way similar to Night of Snow, in that Graziella’s and Salvatore’s shocked silence is like Don Fiorenzo’s state as he “stops short, thunderstruck, suffocated with horror and amazement.” Only the audience, not Don Fiorenzo, can fully understand why he is so overwhelmed by the sudden rush of mixed feelings. Thus the play works like George Bernard Shaw’s drama of ideas and Bertolt Brecht’s epic theater in that the audience must make the synthesis of ideas required to understand the play, because the characters cannot and do not.

Bracco’s use of the unconscious is also comparable to Aeschylus’s use of fate, for both playwrights presuppose that human motivation cannot be fully understood and that conflicts lead necessarily to tragic consequences. Just as Agamemnon cannot know if he should sacrifice Iphigenia because the gods are divided, so Don Fiorenzo cannot comprehend the mixture of his feelings for Annita, but the tragic logic of the cycle of vengeance in the Oresteia (458 b.c.e.; English translation, 1777) and of the workings of the unconscious mind in The Little Saint ends in inevitable death. Though the reasons for human motivation vary from conflicting Greek ideas on religion and the role of the gods to the complicated modern concept of the unconscious, both playwrights find solutions in their drama for the problem of why people act the way they do.

In observing life as it really was, Bracco followed the naturalists, as the tragically realistic events of Night of Snow show. In bringing comedy to the issue of women’s sexual freedom in marriage, a subject equally suitable for tragedy, Bracco further distinguished himself. Finally, most innovative was his dramatization of the workings of the unconscious mind, seen in The Little Saint as well as in many of his other plays.

Biliography

Carlson, Marvin A. The Italian Stage from Goldoni to D’Annunzio. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1981. A general study that examines Italian theater during the time in which Bracco was active.

O’Grady, Deidre. Piave, Boita, Pirandello: From Romantic Realism to Modernism. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000. This study of Italian drama in the nineteenth and twentieth century sheds light on the climate in which Bracco lived and wrote. Bibliography and index.

Witt, Mary Ann Frese. The Search for Modern Tragedy: Aesthetic Fascism in Italy and France. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001. This study examines the rise of Fascism and its appearance in the drama of Italy and France, a popularity that adversely affected the liberal Bracco. Bibliography and index.